The chance to shine (plus, fox and whale art)

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong” (Joseph Chilton Pearce)

We must lose our fear of being wrong. 

I love the underlying flexibility here: the freedom is ours to take creative detours, to keep experimenting and finding the necessary inspiration to try again when a project doesn’t turn out how we thought.

There’s no wrong, honestly. There’s only exploration.

Are you ever so fearful about making a mistake that you can’t even begin? 

I’ve SO been there. One early memory always sticks with me from elementary school, where we were doing a creative group project in class. We had to do video interviews of our classmates as well as take footage of the campus.

Being that this was the 90’s, we had a big and bulky video camera that was passed around from student to student until we’d each had a turn.

I didn’t want my turn to come, as my fear of incorrectly managing the camera in front of other people outweighed any other emotion or rational thought. The fear stopped me from paying attention to the instructions on how to use the camera, stopped me from brainstorming how I could make my contribution special.

The result of my turn was a shaky, inaudible mess.

Print available in the shop

When we looked back at the footage as a class, mine was easily the worst. A few of the more outspoken boys even laughed and wanted to know which one of us was responsible.

I can still remember the embarrassment I felt over 20 years later, but I’m also thankful for the memory.

Sometimes the smallest experience is all we need to learn an important lesson. I learned from an early age what might happen when fear led the way. I learned how easy it could be to shrink my own potential by simply refusing to try. I learned that no one was going to step in and do the work for me.

And while I’ve certainly had to revisit the fear lesson many, many times since then, each time it gets easier to remember from the start. 

Here’s to each phase of our creative lives, and to the lessons we learn along the way.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I’m excited to share my (now finished!) fox painting with you.

Here’s where I’d left the painting in my last blog:

I then worked on the first fox, deciding to leave a blue hue on the fur like a wash of moonlight:

I added the second fox and some additional details, but I wasn’t satisfied yet. I felt like the foxes were too dark and blending in with the background:

So I added a few more details and lightened both foxes so their color would pop against the sky. One of my favorite little details is the heart on each fox. Love, love, love. The final step is to fully flatten the paper so that we can make prints:

I’m loving the permission I’ve given myself recently to more fully embrace whimsical details like little leaves and hearts and stars, etc. Feels good, friends.

♥

I also began work on my next painting, which is part of the same series and features one of my favorite gentle mammals: the whale!

I began the painting with a preliminary sketch, but decided this time to use some of these beautiful handmade papers:

Next I glued down the paper whales and added the first few layers of paint and ink to the ocean. I was talking to Eric recently about how fun it is to paint water and sky, as no ocean or sky is a flat blue. It’s not important to me that the color be realistic, but rather that there be movement and lots of shifts in color:

I next added paint layers to the sky and some fun metallic details / fish to the ocean, filled in the whales with a silver ink wash, and glued down the sun. There’s still a lot to finish / fix, but I’m getting closer and progress always feels good, doesn’t it? Stay tuned for the final painting!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

The key today is that no matter how many times we need to revisit fear in order to move beyond it, no matter how long it takes us to do the project we want to try, there is still no wrong. 

Progress comes in moments, often unseen and unrecognized. While I still don’t love operating a video camera, that’s okay. In this phase of my creative life I don’t need to, but when the time comes I will learn to be more comfortable.

All we need to do is provide ourselves the chance (to explore / mess up / take a risk / succeed), because this is when we have the chance to shine. 

With love,